Ahskance

Just some things to keep in perspective. A) The bombs are already fairly RNG inside the reticle. The penetration value is quite high, but citadels are not something a player can ensure. You place the reticle on the ship, and hope. B) Bomb damage is so high because torp damage is generally low and rockets are vulnerable to outplay. The ship needs at least one source of consistent damage when the other two can be severely mitigated through good manuevering. C) Sample size of only 700 battles or less is still on the low end. Give it a few weeks for the numbers to shake out. D) Continued from above, players who horde Free XP or who ground out the XP on the T8 during the previous patch currently have the ship. More casual players will catch up in time, and we'll see how the numbers shake out as a wider amount of playerbase gets their hands on the new Tier 10 toy.

Understood. If Co-op is the way you want to go, kills and caps are King. I wouldn't worry too much about defended ribbons because that will stop you from taorping down the Cruisers and battleships that follow the DD. Once you can kill the DD, your in-cap area smoke allows you to farm with guns until the Cruisers or battleships have moved up for easy torping, since the ships behind you should spot those. Getting two kills and living to finish the cap is usually a solid 5-700 xp every 5ish minutes.

Why the Co-Op grind as opposed to just standard Randoms? The XP gains are roughly double to triple (or more)? Especially if you're using flags.

"Captains! Due to the installation of the Update, the server will be unavailable: From: Wed. Aug. 05 3:00 AM PT To: Wed. Aug. 05 6:00 AM PT Update size: 3.7 GB"

A) It's a game B) The "amount of fighters" is more a representation of how many planes will get shot down. 3 "fighters" means 3 planes worth in damage. If you want, you can pretend it's a single plane with a really nasty pilot that can pop 5 enemies before he has to rearm.

They're looking at +10% bomb damage and bomber speed. Is it worth it? An extra 1,500 to 2,000 damage on a 6 bomb strike feels pretty small to give up +5% speed on all three aircraft types or +7.5% health on the same. Still, having it and not needing is better than not having and wanting.

"Blacklist" stops the chat messages and "AA support!" spam. Sometimes the criticism is warranted. Nobody is 100% on their game all the time. That being said... a lot of folks just don't play the class because it's not a surface ship and have no interest in making reasonable requests.

Perhaps you're not noticing the 3,263 random battles in a CV, as compared to the few hundreds of the other classes? I specialize in CV play. It's what brought me back to the game, and what I find fits me the most. I've played the others when grouping with folks in game that hate CVs, or for learning something different. I study game design and even went to school for it.

Don't have a chance to read the thread at the moment, but I will in an hour or so. I'm one of those that do see the class as balanced. I'm happy to have a discussion on it in a bit if you had specifics to talk on.

The Tier 5 Italian Cruiser is the last one to have the smaller guns. Tier 6 and up have 203mm guns, with their projectile speed increasing up to Tier 8 where it stays. Italian Cruisers are devastating in good hands. The forum-world decided they were trash, until people learned how to play them. They quickly became the new OP. Venezia has already received a nerf after her dominance in the previous clan battle season, so understand that the line may be further altered in the coming months (though I wouldn't expect the changes to be very large ones).

Why would an AA destroyer go off and lone wolf, though? The guns and torps are not as strong as other DDs as a matter of game balance. EDIT: The Kidd has great brawling guns, and the Freisland has the same... both of which can be used while farming from smoke. When you say "AA Destroyer", I see the non-smoke euro DDs which don't excel on wide flanks anyway.

I don't necessarily agree. To my mind, AA-focused DDs are designed to operate with other ships. It would be different if they were alone, but why would an AA destroyer waste their potential just derping around away from teammates they could be supporting with fires/floods/damage cons and incredible AA. I think of them as playing the flycatcher role of "Surprise Mutha-trucka"ing planes that have gotten too close to line a shot on the DD, but are too far to comfortably just eat the plane losses on the way to their intended target. Once the AA is lit up, the DD is lit... which is exactly what happens on live. Many Hallands will keep their AA running well past their aerial detection for the obnoxious levels of flak that make the retreating planes have to bob and weave. Some will cut the AA early and the 20 second "shot penalty" will keep them lit after the change... but if they're playing with other ships that have their AA left on the planes aren't going to be able to reasonably hover the DD. Once the planes leave AA range, the DD goes dark.

To DDs that learn to keep their AA off, DDs will become nearly invisible to CVs. If the CV wants to harry them, they'll have to drop a fighter consumable which will stay in spotting range of the DD for one or two passes at most. While the CV can update the DD's location on the map, it's going to come down to surface ships to hard spot them so CVs can help. Well, except to the 20 sec detection spot linger from DDs that forget to turn off their AA.

Personally, I liked that each CV line had its own quirks worth remembering so you could try to outplay as appropriate. That being said, many in this game have either not tried carriers or tried them and found the gameplay to be too different from their expectation and stopped. If Wargaming has found that a significant number of the playerbase are not getting the concepts about the different lines from the game experience, then they either have to try to make the gameplay itself scream loudly what the mechanic is as it's happening (which would be remarkably hard in this game, I feel)... or just try to homogenize basic mechanics to allow for a more easily understandable knowledge download. This is the latter, and removes flavor from the game, but if it allows better player to player interaction based on the surface ship knowing what to expect and plan for... then it makes for a better game. All the shots in this game are "skillshots" (player aimed predictive fire). While torpedoes have a white line indicator, playerskill still factors whether to use the line, lead the line, or ignore the line completely. CVs have (I believe) the most consistent Shoot -> Hit, which is why the damage is fairly low and infrequent (one or two passes then fly back to resume firing). In general, you want some choice in the skillshot situation both from the shooter and the target. In many cases, you're going to get hurt some amount, but you can decide how you want to take the hurt at least.

Unfortunately the "at a glance" stat in port doesn't really tell you much. As a CV main, I can tell you that Monaghan has become part of our lineup for clan battles in part because of it's rather capable AA.